rec.autos.simulators

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Jet Jaguar
I have a spam blocking address.  Replying to me is like pulling teeth.
Visit my crappy home page at http://www.racesimcentral.net/~chmilnir/
MSTie #54297

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

That's one way.  Probably the easiest.  But if you are running a championship
season, then some of your cars don't get to race, and so lose big time on
points.  The ones that will be dropped out will be starting from the bottom of
your carset list, and working up.  (If you normally race with 38 other cars,
and you edit a track to have 37, then you are going to have the bottom 3 cars
dropped from your race.  Note that this is NOT the bottom three in points.)

One other, more frustrating, solution is more in dealing with the problem.
First off, make sure that the two lines in the *.txt file are giving you the
right number of cars/pit stalls.  The first line in the txt file has a car
number in it about 2/3 of the way across the line, change it to 40.  Then down
further in the file there is a CARS 35 35 line, or some number similar.  Change
that to also read what the number in the first line is (usually you will want
40 40).  This will allow 39 cars to run.  

Now, the culprit is one or more cars that are not in their pit stall, but in
the pits forever.  You can determine who they are by seeing how they
continually go more and more laps down, yet they are physically in the pits,
yet also not reading "pit" in the standings window.  You must pull up behind
them, gently bump/push them enough for them to get moving under their own power
so they will exit pit lane and go back around and re-pit.  Hopefully, they will
get into their assigned stall, and the problem will be solved.  This is not a
simple task, and sometimes you may have to do numerous bumps to more than one
car.  Save the race often, be patient, and yes, it is a pain in the ass.

If you are not running a championship season, and don't really care if some
cars from your usual lineup get dropped, then of course it is easiest to simply
edit the *.txt file.  

The *.txt file, if you don't know, is under the Nascar99/tracks/nashville
directory, and is then nashville.txt in your situation.  

(snip!)

That's the reason I changed it to 40.  I do have the pit stall and car
numbers set correctly, so I think I'll give it one more try with 40
cars and keep the bump thing in mind.  Now that I think about it, I do
recall that Geoffrey Bodine was 80 laps down, so he was probably the
culprit (I noted it because there were other cars ahead of him that
dropped out).  If that doesn't work, I'll cut it down to like 33 cars
or something.  I'm already far enough behind as it is.

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Jet Jaguar
I have a spam blocking address.  Replying to me is like pulling teeth.
Visit my crappy home page at http://home.att.net/~chmilnir/
MSTie #54297

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Yes, that would be it.  One or more cars that are not on the track, and you see
that the are going laps down each time you complete a lap, yet don't show as
"pit".  I had Marcis and someone else showing -164 laps down and I was
wondering about it since I had never had a car do that.  So.... just before you
complete the race, maybe 5 laps or so from the end or less, (actually the best
place would be on the last lap),  stop and save the race.  This way you can
return to it repeatedly if the your initial bumps don't work out.  Then
complete the race, go slowly down pit lane until you find the culprit (everyone
else will be showing "pit" by now, the jerk will be showing -332 or something),
and you have to dig him out of the pits.  They will look like they are parked
fine, but you have to gently nose in there and move him out of there, pushing
him down pit lane until they drive off on their own, do a lap, then they'll pit
again, and hopefully will now show "pit" instead of their ungodly number of
laps down.  

Good luck.  This sucks, but it's the best way to do it to preserve the
championship season.